Nero No Longer

How one Alexandrian evolved from observer to active participant in organized resistance to the abuses of the American legal system by members of the Trump Administration

About Alexandria is pleased to welcome long-time Alexandrian Jamie Conrad as a guest contributor. A skilled and thoughtful lawyer, Jamie has moved past the handwringing stage to focused action to resist some of the most egregious abuses the American legal system by the Trump Administration. We owe Jamie our admiration.

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I used to be a Republican. In part, that was because everyone in my extended family was. My politics were also a reaction to encountering, as a student, Max Weber’s definition of the state as the legitimized use of force. While I became a Democrat after Ronald Reagan won the presidential nomination, I retained a strong skepticism of authority. This attitude has been animated by a conviction that the natural tendency of any government is to increase its power - and so freedom requires people who push back. While political surveys would class me as liberal, I spent my career as a lawyer primarily representing business groups in efforts to minimize unnecessary regulatory impacts on companies.

While I was appalled when Donald Trump became president, I was somewhat reassured by how inept his first Administration was. I breathed a huge sigh of relief when Trump climbed in the helicopter and vacated the White House on Inauguration Day in 2021, hopeful that things might return to normal.

But, as the Biden Administration attempted to restore order to the Executive Branch, I grew more and more anxious about the MAGA movement. Far from abandoning politics, the MAGA forces were clearly plotting their return to power. I was concerned that the Republican Party seemed to be well on its way toward engineering a takeover of local and state governments that would ensure autocratic, minority rule at the federal level for the foreseeable future.

By 2022, I felt increasingly like my daily work helping small chemical companies make useful products in the United States was naively disconnected from what really mattered – that I was fiddling while Rome was burning. I decided to retire and enlist in the fight to defend democracy.

The problem was that I had no expertise in election law and was only secondarily a litigator. And, many of the big nonprofit legal groups and academic institutes focusing on these issues seemed to have enough money to pay bright young law grads who I assumed were ready to work 60-hour weeks – a life I was not about to return to. I sent out lots of emails to acquaintances I thought might be able to point me in a promising direction. I had one phone interview, but nothing was panning out. Many people just never responded.

Then, about three months after I started this outreach, I heard from a contact who helped direct the Campaign Legal Center. He pointed me to Lawyers Defending American Democracy (LDAD), a small nonprofit started by the former attorney general of Massachusetts, and led by former national and state bar association leaders. LDAD focused on spurring state bars to step up to their jobs of speaking out in defense of the rule of law and in opposition to lawyers who violate their ethical obligations in the course of assisting people like Trump.

One of LDAD’s goals was persuading the 33 “mandatory” state bar associations (the ones located in states, including DC, where a lawyer must belong to the bar association to practice law) that they could speak out in support of democracy, the Constitution, and free and fair elections notwithstanding a Supreme Court decision (the Keller case) holding that such speech could violate the First Amendment rights of disgruntled members.

Over the next four months I wrote a memo making that case, which you can see

About six months later, LDAD asked if I could help on an ethics complaint against Stefan Passantino, the original lawyer for Cassidy Hutchinson, the former White House staffer who supercharged the January 6 committee hearings when she testified vividly about Donald Trump’s actions that day (grabbing the Beast’s steering wheel, throwing plates against the wall, etc.) and his inaction: failing for hours to call off the attack on the Capitol. This testimony occurred after she fired Passantino and got a lawyer who actually represented her, not “Trump World.”

While I had no particular experience working on ethics cases, I was eager to help, so I dug in and ended up drafting large portions of what we eventually filed and recruiting a former D.C. Bar president to sign it. You can see it

It prompted a law professor/advisor to say he couldn’t design an exam question with so many ethics violations. I also drafted two supplements to a petition LDAD had filed against Ken Chesebro, inventor of the “fake electors” scheme.

With Trump’s reelection, LDAD’s potential workload grew exponentially. We decided to start at the top, with Pam Bondi, the current Attorney General. You can see the complaint we drafted

The complaint shows how she perverted the lawyer’s obligation to be a zealous advocate for his or her client by requiring that Justice Department lawyers violate their own ethical obligations or be fired. The best example is Erez Reuveni, a DOJ lawyer who was fired for telling the truth to a federal judge in Maryland. Easily the most momentous of my LDAD activities, the complaint was filed by a Florida lawyer and joined by LDAD, two other NGOs and seventy former judges, law professors and notable lawyers.

The Bondi complaint was an education for me in the relative powers of traditional and social media. Early one afternoon, a member of our group asked if anyone could do a YouTube interview that afternoon at 4:30. I could, so I put on a collared shirt, prepared for about 15 minutes, and did it. I watched it the next day and was shocked to see that, 53 minutes after it went live, over 29,000 people had seen it. Here is the interview.

The video has now been watched more than 300,000 times. I went into it thinking “who watches these things, anyway”? Thank God I had no idea, or I would have sweated bullets over what was instead a fun 20 minutes.

The Florida Bar rejected our complaint the day after we filed it, leading us to file a “mandamus” petition with the Florida Supreme Court arguing that the Bar was required by its own rules to conduct at least a preliminary investigation of the complaint. I likely would have argued the case before the Florida Supreme Court if they had agreed to hear the case – which would have been stressful but, on balance, a cool opportunity.

As it turns out, the court denied our petition. But, we established that, thanks to the Florida Bar and the state’s highest court, the top lawyer in the United States government – one who loves to say that “no one is above the law” – is herself ethically unaccountable for at least the time she is in office.

More needs to be done to prevent other states from going the same route – and we will keep building the case against Bondi for when she leaves office. In the meantime, the work we did on this project will be useful for one or more amicus briefs that we expect to be filing in matters that are making news now.

LDAD’s orientation directly addresses the concern that underlies my legal career: the danger of a government unconstrained by the rule of law. The current Trump Administration has made clear that it will do whatever it wants, and the only thing that can stop them – if anything can – is our legal system.

Before I started volunteering with LDAD, I feared that a future grandchild would one day ask me, in effect, “What did you do during the war, [Grand]Daddy?” I don’t have that worry any more.

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